In 1990, Anne Fishbein ’76 traveled to the Russian city of Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow along the Volga River, to work as a still photographer on an independent film. But what began as a short-term assignment proved a major inspiration for the artist, and she returned every year to photograph the city and its inhabitants. Now, 10 visits and 13 years later, we have the marvelous fruits of Fishbein’s labors in On the Way Home (Perceval Press, 2003), a handsome volume of more than 50 black-and-white photographs culled from this project.

Photographer Anne Fishbein ’76 has found both inspiration and an artistic home in the Russian city of Yaroslavl, the subject for her handsome new book On the Way Home.

Fishbein’s photographs are imbued with a sense of wonder and discovery. They document a Russian city awakening from the slumber of seven decades of relative isolation to a modern world come to visit, this time in the form of an artist and her camera. The varied subjects of Fishbein’s pictures—nurses in a hospital, children in a field, soldiers on guard, a bride and groom in a park—often stand motionless, absorbed in contemplative stillness. They gaze calmly and intently at each other and the viewer, just as the artist’s penetrating eye focuses patiently on them. Her subjects seem fully at ease with themselves, and with the artist’s unlikely presence within their environment. Unafraid of the camera without being unsophisticated, they are at once innocent and self-possessed.

Unlike most bodies of documentary work made after the fall of the Soviet Union, Fishbein’s photographs are not intended as journalistic efforts. Rather than giving an account of a specific time and place, they are the timeless story of a culture that seems of another century to those of us in the West. The pictures reach past the city limits and come to signify a larger sense of place. Together, they form a harmony of voices that we Westerners do not recognize, have not heard. Somehow we name it as Russia, simply because Fishbein has told us with conviction that this is not merely a locale, or a decade, but an entire world that she has witnessed. The pictures also recall how that older world was photographed. There are resonant echoes, for example, of August Sander, who encyclopedically chronicled the faces of German society as it transformed in between the two World Wars, as well as of more recent artists such as Diane Arbus.

It is in this more vague, mysterious depiction of a people that the pictures display their greatest strength. Portraiture can often seem iconic and static, devoid of a sense of action and time; subjects are isolated and uprooted, deprived of a context. Fishbein’s photographs instead infuse the genre with a sense of epic; they make manifest her desire to record a sense of history. It is precisely her subjects’ lack of movement that reveals not only who they are, but also where they have come from. The enveloping silence of her subjects bespeaks a long, rich and melancholy journey, its precise details unknown, but its existence palpably felt nonetheless. Their stillness is larger, and their tranquil gaze longer than what we know in our world, one comprised more of short and fleeting moments. Their simplicity and tender composure, no longer familiar to most of us, appear almost monumental.

The photographs are a record of the meeting of two realities. One is the modern world of the American artist, which thrives on shedding its past, but ultimately comes to look yearningly across to this older place that refuses, or perhaps is unable, to abandon its history. As a tool of modernity, the photograph lives in a world where continuity has been broken, and searches instead for what has somehow remained whole. Photography such as that of Anne Fishbein seeks a past that is still alive, often in order to take its confession before it dies.

The encounter is, to some extent, autobiographical. Fishbein—who earned her B.A. in communications from Northwestern and her M.F.A. in photography from Yale, and whose work is in the permanent collections of such museums as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York—is of Lithuanian extraction, and although her connection to her geographical roots had been heavily filtered through several generations of immigration, her travels to Russia allowed her to rediscover and reinterpret the world of her ancestors. Memory and invention have fused in her travels towards these people, which are a journey towards a sense of home and origin.

On the Way Home is beautifully designed and printed. The two introductions (one by filmmaker Chris Schmidt, the other by Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Robert Sobieszek) both provide thoughtful context for the work. Otherwise it is a purely visually driven narrative, one that lets the untitled and uncaptioned photographs alone explain, or merely suggest. There is not so much as a page number to distract one from the forceful, wordless logic of the images. On the Way Home is available through www.percevalpress.com.